UNITED NATIONS, Dec 6: Speakers at a seminars on education in Pakistan on Monday called for vastly increased spending on education (from the present two per cent to five or six per cent) and said that the Higher Education Council (HEC), should be turned into a research supporting institution.
In his remarks, Shahid Javed Burki, a former Pakistan finance minister, urged the government to release its direct control of universities and give the institutions full autonomy so as to boost higher education in Pakistan.
“The State should pull back from the direct management of universities,” said Mr Burki, who is also a former World Bank vice-president, told a symposium here.
The two-day international symposium on Issues in Higher Education in Pakistan has been organized by the Promotion of Education in Pakistan (PEP) Foundation of New York in collaboration with the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations and the Consulate General of Pakistan here.
Experts in higher education presented different models and strategies to raise the level of higher education in Pakistan and to make it accessible to the masses, especially from the economically disadvantaged families.
In his presentation, Mr Burki also said that students must pay for education at the higher level and the gap that currently exists between the Quaid-i-Azam University and LUMS should be closed. Fees should be market based, he said.
Mr Burki also proposed that the government should run an educational finance programme to help children from poor families and those from backward regions as well as women to attend higher education institutions.
The cause of education called for steps to promote full cooperation between government and private sector, he said.
Sarbuland Khan, a director in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Welfare, said: “The crisis of education in Pakistan is not just a sectorial crisis; it is a national catastrophe that affects every facet of our national life.”
Calling for “collective soul-searching” so that ‘education’ and ‘the search for knowledge’ were placed at the “centre of our national life and the organizing principle of our communities — our villages, towns and cities, Mr Khan proposed that big landowners should be taxed another 1 per cent to pay for higher education.
As regards resource mobilization, Sarbuland Khan proposed a multi-stakeholder effort in which, the public, private and non-profit sectors, contributed according to their optimum capacities.
Pakistan’s UN Ambassador Munir Akram in his brief remarks said that the government was alive to the situation in the field of education and was trying to respond in the best possible manner.
